Patrick Stewart found 'Star Trek' fame but always returned to Shakespeare and the stage

LONDON (AP) — Before he captained the Starship Enterprise, Patrick Stewart commanded the Shakespearean stage.

And it was the stage to which he returned time and again, even after “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “X-Men” made him a Hollywood star .

The theater was where Stewart felt at home, and where he could fill an auditorium with his sonorous voice, tinged with a warm Yorkshire burr.

Stewart spent a decade and a half with the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose former artistic director, Gregory Doran, remembered him as “a true Shakespearean” and “a theater actor in his bones.” In later life, he formed a memorable double act with his friend Ian McKellen, who called Stewart “the most respected and beloved actor of his generation.”

London’s West End theaters plan to dim their lights next Tuesday evening in memory of Stewart, who died Wednesday in Los Angeles, aged 86.

He achieved both screen fame and stage kudos, a notoriously difficult balance.

McKellen warned him against starring in sci-fi after Stewart was offered a role in the “Star Trek” series, which debuted in 1987. McKellen remembered telling him to “think of your stage career” rather than risk “getting lost in Hollywood for years and years.”

“Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did,” McKellen said in a social media post after Stewart’s death.

Across six decades, Stewart performed in plays by modern giants including Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. But the work of William Shakespeare was his first love and his lodestar.

During what he later called a “hand-to-mouth” childhood in northern England, Stewart’s love of theater was encouraged by an English teacher and by his mother Gladys, who performed in amateur dramatics.

He memorized Shakespeare’s soliloquies for fun as a teenager, won a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, then performed in rep, mounting a different play every week. It was an in-at-the-deep-end training ground for young actors that he said taught him: “Learn lines, hit your marks, don’t knock over the furniture.”

Stewart was a core member of the Royal Shakespeare Company for a decade and a half from 1966, and later returned to the company, appearing in more than 40 productions. He moved from supporting parts to starring roles including Shylock, Prospero, Macbeth, Henry IV and Mark Antony.

Doran recalled how, in a 2006 production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” Stewart had played the Egyptian queen’s consort as a military hero “no longer able to live up to his own PR.”

“Patrick restored the magnificence of the role in a tragedy so often regarded as ‘her play,’” Doran said in a statement.

Stewart's starship captain, Jean-Luc Picard, had a ramrod-straight military bearing and an underlying humanity. In 2007, he combined a martial exterior with cunning and insecurity for Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” In Rupert Goold’s production, set in a chilly dystopia, Stewart’s murderous Scottish ruler had what an Associated Press review called “pantherlike” magnetism, and a charged sexual chemistry with Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth.

Stewart earned a Tony Award nomination when the show moved from London to New York in 2008. And he was in his element.

“What I’m doing now is all I ever wanted to do,” he told the AP during the Broadway run. “I didn’t have any other ambitions.”

Soon after, Stewart played Hamlet’s murderous uncle-turned-stepfather, Claudius, to David Tennant’s prince in an RSC production of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

The combination of the “Star Trek” captain and “Doctor Who” star Tennant made the production a major draw. Hordes of fans thronged the stage door, and the RSC had to ban people bringing sci-fi memorabilia to be signed.

But it was clear the casting was no gimmick. Critics praised the subtle way Stewart played Claudius — potentially a one-note wicked-uncle role — as a charming, seemingly reasonable man of state. The performance won an Olivier Award.

Science fiction met the stage again when Stewart teamed up with McKellen. The two working-class northerners turned theatrical knights had first worked together in 1977 in Tom Stoppard’s “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour” and became fast friends while filming the “X-Men” movies, where Stewart played Professor Charles Xavier and McKellen was Magneto.

In 2009, the two actors starred in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and later in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land,” both directed by Sean Mathias. They performed the plays in London’s West End, on a U.K. tour and on Broadway, where the two shows ran on alternate days.

They mined both comedy and existential bleakness from both plays. In Pinter’s tragicomedy about two writers — one struggling but hopeful, the other successful but trapped — there was crackling humor and mounting tension in their escalating battle of wills.

In “Godot,” they played Vladimir and Estragon, the two drifters waiting for a mysterious someone who never arrives, like a music hall double act.

The love of Shakespeare never left him. Each day for weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he recorded one of the poet’s sonnets at his California home, posting them on social media. He was delighted that it brought new fans to the Bard.

“People will say, ‘Love your sonnets. Keep them up,’” Stewart told the BBC.

“Loving Shakespeare as I do, and living at the moment in southern California, to find that I am being accosted by people wanting to talk about Shakespeare and the sonnets is so satisfying, and it’s giving me a great thrill.”